High-Throughput Single-Nucleus RNA Profiling of Minimal Puncture FFPE Samples Reveals Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity of Cancer.

Puncture biopsy, especially those preserved by formalin fixed paraffin embedding (FFPE) samples, play an important role in various research purposes. Diverse single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) techniques have been developed for FFPE samples, however, how to perform high-throughput snRNA-seq on small FFPE puncture samples is still a challenge. Here, the previously developed snRNA-seq technique (snRandom-seq) is optimized by implementing a pre-indexing procedure for the minimal puncture FFPE samples.

Three-dimensional molecular architecture of mouse organogenesis.

Mammalian embryos exhibit sophisticated cellular patterning that is intricately orchestrated at both molecular and cellular level. It has recently become apparent that cells within the animal body display significant heterogeneity, both in terms of their cellular properties and spatial distributions. However, current spatial transcriptomic profiling either lacks three-dimensional representation or is limited in its ability to capture the complexity of embryonic tissues and organs.

High-throughput single nucleus total RNA sequencing of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues by snRandom-seq.

Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues constitute a vast and valuable patient material bank for clinical history and follow-up data. It is still challenging to achieve single cell/nucleus RNA (sc/snRNA) profile in FFPE tissues. Here, we develop a droplet-based snRNA sequencing technology (snRandom-seq) for FFPE tissues by capturing full-length total RNAs with random primers.

Generation of functional posterior spinal motor neurons from hPSCs-derived human spinal cord neural progenitor cells.

Spinal motor neurons deficiency results in a series of devastating disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and spinal cord injury (SCI). These disorders are currently incurable, while human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs)-derived spinal motor neurons are promising but suffered from inappropriate regional identity and functional immaturity for the study and treatment of posterior spinal cord related injuries. In this study, we have established human spinal cord neural progenitor cells (hSCNPCs) via hPSCs differentiated neuromesodermal progenitors (NMPs) and demonstrated the hSCNPCs can be continuously expanded up to 40 passages.

OrthReg: a tool to predict -regulatory elements based on cross-species orthologous sequence conservation.

-regulatory elements play an important role in the development of traits and disease in organisms (Ma et al., 2020; Woolfe et al., 2005) and their annotation could facilitate genetic studies.